Marked Up

Latest from the Blog

My Competition 4

This one is aspirational. Wormhole Mana is good (at least book one; I just started book two). In no particular order… It’s tight third person. There are internal monologues in first person of the character monologuing. It’s all very obvious. No weird point-of-view changes. There is incremental “what’s going on?” as the magic system is…

Who’s Responsible?

I really, really like black-and-white morality in my fiction. Unfortunately, that makes for unrealistic (and often dull) stories. A reasonable current events example is Iran. One of the problems with decapitation is that when you kill those responsible, who’s left to make decisions? Iran as a state cannot surrender because there is no one who…

Impulsive Anger

I’ve finally figured out what irritates me so much about Cultivation books: The cultivators spend so much time, effort, and pain doing all sorts of complicated techniques to grow stronger, but as soon they feel insulted – legitimately or not – all that discipline flies out the window and they fly into an impulsive rage.…